Written by Spencer Aland
Call me weird, but I’m one of those people who really enjoys a good statistical report or looking at things through numbers. I was looking through the internet when I recently came across some interesting numbers, and I thought I might as well crunch them in a statistical model and see what comes out.
The numbers I found were the violent crime and murder rates by state as reported by the FBI, and the gun ownership percentages by state from the national firearms survey. I decided to go with the year 2003 because it was the most recent that had complete data from each state. All I wanted to see was if there was any type of correlation.
First lets look at the violent crime rates:
[For those interested, and can't read the graph (sorry about the resolution) the R-squared value is 0.0421, also the control variables were race (white value 0 and non-white value 1), educational attainment, median income, and population density.]
What does this prove? Nothing! I’m not going to say, “Look! crime actually goes down with more guns!” Because the correlation is practically non-existent. The important thing shown here is that crime does not go up or down dependent upon gun ownership. In fact, the number of privately owned firearms is completely uncorrelated with violent crime.
Next Murder rate:
[R-squared value of 0.0007 with same control variables]
The correlation with the murder rate is even lower. While this also serves to show that more legally owned guns don’t reduce crime it equally shows that more guns do not increase it. The problem with gun control is that it is entirely based upon the principle that reducing guns reduces crime.
I don’t believe that giving a gun to every law abiding citizen is the answer, but I would certainly argue that taking guns away from them is not the solution.
